RichTextKit not receiving as much attention. Best way to involve the community?

[bryan1anderson]

@danielsaidi first of all.. thank you, you beautiful human. Brilliant work, brilliantly executed. Very clean. Very needed. You've helped thousands of us.

With that said, I see you are increasingly needing to comment about how the library is falling behind as you take on different responsibilities and priorities. I've also see you mention you're open to help.

I've made my own contributions. I'd be happy to make further contributions. But basically.. what I'm getting at is... maybe it's time to open this project up as much as possible?

Post a few places and try and attract contributors. Add users with merge permission.. Formalize a PR review process. Assign tasks out, plan road map, merge, write tests. Actively seek help. Of the 53 opened issues on the repo, only one is marked with "help-wanted."

Labels for issues that could be picked up by the community like "easy-help-wanted" or "good-first-issue"

Make a contribution guideline.

My contribution: #225 has been sitting in a pr for a while. By no means am I pointing this out as a complaint, but demonstrating that the project is at risk of stagnation even though there are interested developers who are willing and able to contribute. Many of RichTextKit users opt to fork, and then that's where our updates and changes rest.

Basically I want to keep this thing alive! Would you be interested in formally delegating and sharing the load?

[danielsaidi]

Hi @bryan1anderson

Thank you so much for your kind words!

Yeah, the library is falling behind, and I'm very frustrated about it. The main reason is because I have been swamped with my main commercial project (KeyboardKit), and have had no headroom for the full rewrite I think should be made to make this work best, rewriting it from scratch with @observable and Swift Concurrency in mind to make it future proof and more performant.

...but since I don't use the library in any of my current projects, I also have no natural reasons for working on it...especially since it would take time away from the projects that generate revenue for my company. And as the time between me doing something with it increases, the harder it becomes to fit the huge project into my head.

I think your suggestions sound great! But the last time I worked with someone on the project, it took a lot of work and effort, and required additional testing and bug fixes for things that broke, so I've been holding off.

I've been thinking about a monetization model as well, to provide me with both an incentive for maintaining the project and a way for the project to generate money that converted to time would allow me to focus on it part time. But it's a hard nut to crack, since it's tricky to go from open-source to a hybrid model like I have in KeyboardKit.

I am still committed to the rewrite, which shouldn't take that long, but am at the same time humbled by looking back the last few years, on how much time other projects do take. I'd love to continue this discussion, and hear more on your thoughts, since I am very happy with the idea of this project, and am blown away by how many who find it useful.